A quick look at Gentoo Linux

A quick look at Gentoo Linux

the article posted here is relatively fair to Gentoo. albeit very short, and incomplete, the points made are accurate. mentioning gentoo without mentioning portage is a no-no- precisely because portage *is* Gentoo. Portage is far more than debians package system-for it handles all dependencies automagically and allows for mulitple concurrent versions of libraries using the SLOT mechanism. The point of configurabilty outweighs the point of optimizability, IMHO. No other distro allows you to setup your multimedia apps, from the get-go, to take advantage of the wealth of various codecs- and this is legal *because* you the end-user are doing the compiling-not gentoo.org. This applies beyond codecs, for this configrability allows you to easily configure your DVD and to take full advantage of freetype. getting mplayer/xine/totem etc. correctly configured and install on other mainstream distros remains an intractable nightmare. Gentoo is as stable as you let it be- being as it is that most gentoo users prefer the bleeding-edge they tend to run more unstable systems-but there willingness to do so helps the software development community at large immensely by exploring combinations of software and their dependent libraries which expose faults and errors in application code, helping to quickly resolve such errors. There probably is no better metadistribution for the development of new software- there is no such thing as a crippled kde or cripelled gnome with Gentoo-thus Gentoo users get the real thing. no Gentoo is not for everyone, but there are countless newbies in the Gentoo community, and although Gentoo differs greatly from redhat/suse/mandrake as regards runlevels and configuration files-anyone who can administer a Gentoo system can administer any other linux distro and *BSD with only a minor learning curve involved.

if you wish to install Gentoo on mulitple machines which have all have the same processor generation(ie. i686) one can simply use the -b option when emerging software which will create a bzipped2 archive of the compiled source which can be burnt onto a CD for distribution amongst multiple machines- it adds approximately 1 minute per compilation on average. If your machine are using differing processors (and to some extent differing architectures) you can do re-merge of the entire system for the machine at hand, compiled for the specific processor of that machine, using the build-only option in emerge on the originating machine. Such in combination with ccache and distcc make it possible to install gentoo on many machines quite quickly(with mulitple machines setup with a stage3 Gentoo system and pre-compiling your own binaries the speed is comparable to precompiled distros installs, provided that you use the -b option when doing your intial first machine install-which obviates the need to redo the entire procedure for each machine/stage3-based installs on a network of roughly equivalent machines allow for remarkable compilation speed when used in conjunction with distcc-with sufficient machines compilation time can be reduced by as much as 60%, perhpas even more, and the compiled sources only have to be compiled once)

Gentoo does not require reinstalls and does not follow the release schedules like other distros-upgrading Gentoo from one version to the next is an absolute breeze except when all the core libraries are being upgraded beyond minor version increases(as was the case between 1.2/1.3 and 1.4-which was somewhat involved-yet even such a major upgrade(gcc-2.9.5->3.2 glibc 2.2->2.3.2 etc.) is doable within an existing installation) and unlike other distros users Gentoo users get to experience incremental improvements to their software on a regular basis defined by them-ie. you can upgrade per week/month etc. this results in the constantly refreshing appeal of gentoo-living up to its reputation as bleeding-edge. of course if stability is your goal, a little research in the incredible gentoo forums will help you to decide on which version of which software works best for you- and you can then maintain it at these versions and only upgrade with minor versions only that software which you wish to change, allowing for fine-grained securtiy updates and incremental changes. the Gentoo forums provide help with this and virtually all other issues in one of the most lively, friendly and informative forums which exist in the linux world-this is utlimately what results in the most Gentoo "converts" for there is no better support period in the entire linux community.